1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of consumer electronics, and in particular to a bridge that facilitates the coupling of a non-IP-compliant network, such as HAVi, and the Internet Web.
2. Description of Related Art
A Home Audio/Video Interoperability (HAVi) network is an example of a network that allows all manner of digital consumer electronics and home appliances that comply with the HAVi specification to communicate with each other. HAVi is a digital audio/video networking initiative that provides a home networking software specification for seamless interoperability among home entertainment products. As its name implies, the HAVi specification is specifically designed for the interoperability of audio/video (AV) devices. It includes, for example, specific Functional Component Modules (FCMs) for controlling tuners, VCRs, cameras, AV discs, and so on. The HAVi specification defines middleware that manages multi-directional AV streams, event schedules, and registries, while providing Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for creating new generations of software applications. Other home and office automation network technologies include Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), the Universal Serial Bus (USB), HomeRF Lite, and the Bluetooth standard, each involving substantial contributions from Philips Electronics, the OSGI/Jini technology of Sun Microsystems, Inc., and others.
Preferably, functions on a device within a network system may be controlled from another device within the system. U.S. Pat. No. 5,959,536, “TASK-DRIVEN DISTRIBUTED MULTIMEDIA COMPUTER SYSTEM”, issued 28 Sep. 1999 for Paul Chambers and Saurabh Srivastava, assigned to Philips Electronics North America, and incorporated by reference herein, discloses a control system wherein controllers act upon respective software representations of each consumer device on a network. By encapsulating the variable complexity of tasks within a software representation, the control can be made as simple or as sophisticated as needed to bring the capabilities up to a common level, and applications can uniformly manipulate devices that embody very different levels of sophistication and complexity.
Each of the various networks generally offers particular advantages for the types of devices that they are intended to support, and therefore it is likely that more than one network may be present in a home or office environment. Most network architectures allow for some interaction between networks, the interaction is generally limited to providing access to an alternative network. The HAVi specification, for example, allows for a Web proxy FCM1 that offers sharable access to the Internet, as illustrated by the system 100 of FIG. 1. As defined in the HAVi specification, a client 110 locates a Web proxy FCM 140 on the HAVi network 130, and communicates with the FCM 140 via the message passing scheme 120 of the HAVi protocol. The Web proxy FCM 140 provides the following Web services: Open, Close, Send, Receive, and Get Capability. The client 110 calls the Open service to open a connection to the Internet 170 via the TCP/IP 150 and Internet access 160 modules. This service includes, for example, allocating buffers for sending and receiving information, dialing a modem connection, accessing a service provider, and so on. Thereafter, the client 110 calls the Send service to send messages to specified Web servers 180 on the Internet 170, and the FCM 140 uses the Receive service to send messages from the Internet 170 to the client 110. The Close service closes the Internet access for a particular client 110. The Get Capability service permits the Web client 110 to discover the protocols (HTTP, FTP, SMTP, etc.) supported by the Web proxy FCM 140. 1. “The HAVi Specification: Specification of the Home Audio/Video Interoperability (HAVi) Architecture”, by Sony, Philips, Hitachi, Sharp, Matsushita, Thomson, Toshiba, and Grundig, Version 1.0, 18 Jan. 2000, Section 6.11 “Web Proxy FCM”, pages 362–370.
Other networking protocols generally include foreign-network access capability, with more or less the same level of interoperability between networks as provided by the HAVi Web proxy FCM. The notable exceptions are UPnP and OSGI, which employ an IP (Internet Protocol) network protocol, and provides a significant level of integration among UPnP devices and Web services and capabilities. For ease of reference, the term IP network is used herein to define a network and associated software/middleware that is compliant with the Internet Protocol (IP), and the term Non-IP network is used herein to define a network and associated software/middleware that is not necessarily compliant with the IP. In like manner, IP devices or objects are herein devices or objects that are compliant with IP, and Non-IP devices or objects are devices or objects that are not necessarily compliant with IP.
Although the HAVi, and other Non-IP network specifications, allows a client, such as a set-top-box, to access to the Internet, they do not, per se, provide a ‘bridge’ between the networks that enables mutual access of services between a Non-IP network and the Internet Web. Conventionally, a mutual access of services between the Non-IP network and an IP network generally requires a modification of objects on one or both of the networks to achieve this integration. A suggested approach, for example, to allow a web-browser to control devices on a HAVi network is the use of a “Local” addressing type in lieu of a Universal Resource Locator (URL) addressing type at the Web proxy FCM. When this local address is used, a web-browser fetches and displays a HTML-based user interface (UI) that controls the HAVi device. This solution, however, requires that the web-browser be modified to support this HAVi-specific “local” keyword. This solution also limits the use of this control to “local” web-browsers, thereby precluding remote control via an Internet link.